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Dogyuun ドギューン!!

Dogyuun (ドギューン!!) is a vertical shooting game developed and published by Toaplan in 1992, and one of the few titles created by the company that has not received any ports to home platforms to date. It is set on a fictional planet called Dino, where the player faces off against a race of robotic aliens holding the planet hostage. The player ship in Dogyuun is known as the Sylfer, and is equipped with a tractor beam that can grab smaller enemies and item containers and carry it with them. There are four weapons and two sub-functions for the player to take advantage of, as well as a unique ship upgrade mechanic that is only available when two players are tagged in.

Dogyuun offers a fairly simple gameplay experience held up by a very strong visual and audio presentation, solid game difficulty, and overall game intensity.

It has received criticism for its relative simplicity compared to other games in the genre (and others made by Toaplan), as it doesn't particularly innovate in any strong ways, aside from a unique multiplayer mechanic where one player can use the tractor beam on another player in order to form an extremely strong ship with double the firepower.

It also has received criticism regarding a counter-stop present due to an oversight in the boss design and the tractor beam mechanic.

Gameplay Overview

Dogyuun utilizes three buttons for its core gameplay.

There are ten stages in the game, and the game loops forever, in theory. However, due to a programming error, the game soft-locks at the start of loop 5 stage 1 (5-1), so the game is considered to only have four loops.

A: Fires the equipped weapon

B: Uses the player's equipped sub-function

C (Hold): Activates the ship's tractor beam, which can grab small enemies and item containers (once grabbing an object, you no longer have to hold the button)

Dogyuun features four primary weapon types, selected by collecting a colored weapon capsule that cycles between red, blue, purple, and green (in that order). There are no weapon upgrades to collect; collecting the same weapon rewards the player with 5000 points. Uniquely, if you tag in a second player, and tractor beam their ship, your ships will fuse together into a super-ship, allowing the player access to stronger versions of these four weapons.

Weapons

Mega Shot (Blue): The default player shot. Fires a straight beam forward that shrinks as it's out. Fire rate can be increased by rapidly pressing A. When equipped with the Thruster, smaller lasers are also shot from the side of the player's options.

Psycho Beam (Purple): A curving homing shot that bends towards enemies. Only one volley can be on screen at once. It deals a respectable amount of damage, and can hit targets several times, but it is limited in the amount of firepower that can be on-screen at once, and it has a hard time hitting enemies at certain angles.

V-Laser (Green): Two bolts of lightning curve out of the ship. The major advantage of this weapon is that it can consistently damage anything in its path, and its path can be left out indefinitely, but it is by far the weakest weapon in the game, only finding use in particularly unique situations against basic zako.(It also plays a horrible sound when being fired.)

Homing Fire (Red): A homing shot that curves in 90 degree angles towards its targets. Only two volleys can be on screen at once. Fire rate can be increased by rapidly pressing A, allowing it to deal great damage with point-blanking, and its movement patterns make it useful in more situations than its purple counterpart.

Sub-Functions

Bomb: Releases a one-time use bomb that grants the player invincibility and deals significant damage to any enemies unlucky enough to be caught in its path. The bomb is strong enough to destroy many sub-bosses in the game alone.

Thruster: When pressed down, the player's movement speed is massively increased, granting them the ability to dart across the screen. This sub-function is highly useful, but must be used carefully in order to avoid jetting straight into bullets or airborne enemies.

Two-Player

In a feature that is unique to Dogyuun, both players have the ability to tractor-beam each others' ships with the C button. When this is done, the two ships fuse into one super-ship and gain devastating firepower, enhancing their equipped weapon and doubling their damage and spread. In exchange, the players are given a bigger hitbox.

Dying while using the fused ship results in a lost life from both players.

Checkpoints are disabled when two players are playing.

Scoring

Scoring in Dogyuun is about as simple as it gets, with a flat amount of points awarded for destroying enemies and collecting score items.

The player can gain 10 points about every 10 frames by grabbing an object with the tractor beam and holding onto it, which can be a considerable challenge considering that the object being held can also be destroyed by enemy fire and collisions. Missiles fired by enemies are destructible and are worth 10 points each.

Collecting a power-up that the player is already holding will reward them with 5000 points. There are also score items that reward the player with 5000 points when collected, but for the most part, these only appear in Stage 3. There are no bonuses tied to end-of-stage boss destruction (even destroying boss parts typically doesn't award very many points), no bonus points awarded for extends and bombs at the end of stages (you can only hold one bomb at a time anyway), and there is no bonus points awarded when defeating a boss.

There is an item in one of the capsules at the end of boss fights that flashes back and forth between +100000pts and a 1UP, and through the use of a glitch (described below in Extends), you can acquire two of these for a total of 200,000pts rewarded. See Extends below for more information on how to get these items to trigger.

The best scores in Dogyuun involve optimizing movement in order to hold onto objects with the tractor beam for as long as you can, picking up a new object as soon as possible, and destroying as many destructible objects as possible. A significant amount of score comes from putting together an optimal route for collecting the +5000pts items during the high-speed section at the start of Stage 3.

Each loop of the game increases the overall score potential (including the automatic score gain from tractor beaming objects).

Counter-stop

Due to the a combination of the design of the tractor beam's bonus point mechanic, various safespots in boss encounters, and bosses not timing out, it is possible to achieve several different counter-stops in Dogyuun. Some bosses can be rendered completely defenseless via boss part destruction, or have places on the screen that they are unable to hit the player at (top left of the screen seems to be common in Dogyuun). When holding an object with the tractor beam in one of these situations, it's possible to leave the game untouched from that point on, and eventually acquire huge amounts of points, forever. The automatic point gain from the tractor beam is also increased in subsequent loops, making the strategy particularly lucrative in the third or fourth loops of the game.

Players aiming to record their high scores on public leaderboards are discouraged from using these sorts of exploits to earn points.

Extends

The player can earn a single score-based 1UP by earning 200,000 points.

A hidden extend/100,000pts item can be discovered by destroying specific bosses with specific weapons. The extend will only appear once per credit/run.

The item capsule that drops from the boss will only contain a weapon upgrade if you have already collected the extend in another boss fight. However, the 100,000pts item will continue to appear by destroying bosses with specific weapons, making it good for scoring to collect the 100,000pts item instead of the extend.

Boss

Weapon

Stage 3

V-Laser

Stage 4

Homing Fire

Stage 5

Psycho Beam

Stage 6

V-Laser

Stage 7

Mega Shot

Stage 9

Mega Shot

Through the use of a glitch involving carrying an unopened item capsule to the beginning of Stage 5 and ramming it into the capsule at the start of the stage, it is possible to earn two extends instead of one.

Strategy

See Dogyuun/Strategy for stage maps, enemy and boss descriptions, walkthroughs, and advanced play strategies.

Story

(Special thanks to mojilove for the story translation, as well as several other translations on this page!)

Lagoon, the 104th planet, is home to the International Defense Force Headquarters where defense organizations from all countries come together.

This headquarters assembled a special squadron called ISM to intercept aliens that could attack at any moment.

ISM harnesses the power of the most advanced technology available to man, and is fully backed by the International Defense Force.

One day, ISM received an emergency sortie order from the Commander:

"There is an emergency at the planet colony Dino! Move out immediately!!"

The squadron, including the new variable fighter Sylfer that had just been deployed, went to scout out the base on the planet, as communications had suddenly ceased.

Dino was a beautiful planet—what had happened here...?

When the base came into sight, the ISM pilots found it had become infested with mysterious mechanoid lifeforms.

ISM Pilot: "Let's head back. It's too dangerous to go any further."

Kyle: "Wait, we're this close to getting intel on the centropolis. There are still many people trapped in there."

ISM Pilot: "But we'll be dead meat if the aliens find us. All right, let's do this quickly!"

Kyle: "Yeah, I found it!"

Just then, Kyle's recon ship was captured and destroyed by a huge robot(the stage 2 boss).

ISM Pilot: "Kyle!!!"

The recon mission had taken a drastic turn, with the other pilots now ready to launch a desperate counteroffensive!

第１０４惑星ラグーン。ここは全国家の防衛組織が集められた国際防衛軍本部が

置かれている。この本部には、いつ襲ってくるかもしれないエイリアンを

迎え撃つために特殊軍隊が組まれていた。

軍隊の名は「ＩＳＭ」。この軍隊は、最高のテクノロジーを駆使し、

国際防衛軍が作り上げた軍事機関である。その「ＩＳＭ」に、司令部から

緊急出動の命令が下された。

「惑星植民地ディノに異常事態発生！直ちに出動せよ！！」

通信の途絶えた基地へ、ロールアウトしたばかりの新型可変戦闘機シルファーらは

調査に向かった。

この美しい惑星植民地ディノに、何があったというのか、、、。

その時だった。彼らの眼に映ったものは、謎の機械生命体の巣窟と化した基地であった。

「そろそろ引き上げよう。これ以上の偵察は危険だ。」

「もう少し待ってくれ。あと少しでセンターポリスの情報が手にはいる。

あの中にはまだ我々の仲間が大勢残っているんだ。」

「だがエイリアンに発見されるとまずい。急ぐんだ！」

「よし・・・見つけたぞ！」

とその時！カイルの搭乗する偵察機が敵の大型ロボットに捕らえられ、破壊されてしまった。

「カイルッ！！！！！」

今、決死の逆襲が始まる！

Development History

From the start, Toaplan's goal with Dogyuun was to make a game with the best visuals possible, in response to criticism on the visuals of their previous games. Since graphics were their main focus with Dogyuun, the team were unable to put a greater focus on the gameplay, which they felt was "unimaginative". A significant amount of development time was spent on designing and animating huge bosses.
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